The smell of burning metal
I seem to have accidentally acquired a new hobby.
For years I’ve been intrigued by electronics but despite my Dad being an electronic engineer (in ye olden dayes, before he started selling wine instead) I never ended up playing much with hardware. There was an incident involving a soldering iron, a broken scalextric car and me spraying molten melt all over the place, but I suspect that my overactive brain has exaggerated the importance of that in my running from electronics.
Anyways, after a chat with a former workmate (who now lives in San Francisco and has started attending Noisebridge events) I found out a couple of things – 1) That there is now a London Hackspace and 2) Mitch Altman (one of the Noisebridge founders) would be over this month to do one of his soldering workshops. So, I wandered along and learned to solder. I grabbed one of the Adafruit MiniPov3 kits, stuck it together, pinched a pair of AAs off of someone and it all worked. Which is rather cool:
It’s got a serial port on the board and the controller is an eeprom, so I see some learning to code for an Atmel microcontroller in my future.
After my success with my first project (I was even complimented on my soldering and given a quizzical look and informed that I must have done it before…) I decided to grab a shiny thing – an Arduino LoL Shield, designed by Jimmie Rodgers, who was also at the Hackspace meet to show off his kits and talk about cool things. It looks like it may well be a good ‘you will now learn to solder by constant repetition’ project…so may LEDs:
I’ve got an Arduino starter kit (an Arduino, breadboard and Big Box ‘o components) on the way and have plans to try and do shiny things with electronics. Well, I say that, but so far my only plan is to make an iPhone version of the MiniPov that will do cool things with the accelerometer. In the meantime I have another kit to put together – a scrolly LED message thing picked up from Maplin when I went in to buy a soldering iron. Unfortunately it’s not got a programmable controller, but having a friend at work who used to tinker with electronics is useful, as I now know which PIC is the code compatible programmable version…
However, the coolest thing about the entire evening for me is this – after finishing my kit and thanking Mitch for doing the class, he grinned, said “You’re ready” and handed me one of these:
Not only can I now claim to know how to solder, I can prove it – I have a badge…
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Posted: March 13th, 2010 under blog.
Tags: badge, electronics, jimmie rodgers, mitch altman, solder